by Glenn Tschimpke
Staff Writer
Arthur Crofton says he talks funny. Well, duh. He’s half Alabaman.
“Sho ‘nuff. I’m a southern boy.”
For those who know Crofton, or have at least heard him, the last statement is pretty funny, especially considering the amount of tongue twisting the Brit-turned-American-deejay had to do to wrench his smooth English accent into a lazy southern drawl.
Although the venerable morning personality for FM-96.1 evokes as much southern heritage as Birmingham, England, Crofton insists he’s a true-blue American. He spells “color” without a “u,” fills his car with gas instead of petrol and is an avowed fan of jazzman Miles Davis. It’s a long way from the young man who grew up on the north coast of England looking for a break in the radio industry.
“I am now 50 years old,” he explained. “I’ve been here since I was 19. I know nothing about England. I mean, I go and visit but I don’t know what they think, I don’t know what TV shows they watch. I am an American. I think like an American, I act like an American, I vote like an American — even a Floridian. I know how to punch my ballot. It’s never been a problem.”
Like the Marine Corps and the mafia, a popular saying can be applied to Crofton’s roots: you can take a man out of England, but you can’t take England out of the man. He hasn’t lost his flair for dry humor — it’s genetically woven into the DNA of all Brits. He can easily let his intonation fall into the slanted and angular Cockney dialect, or at least a reasonable facsimile of one to a Cockney neophyte.
“I’m bilingual,” he said. “I can do it both ways. I’m English/American bilingual and can translate if you need me to.”
American assimilation aside, Crofton can still converse in crisp, cadenced phrases indigenous to the learned and reputable tea-drinking class of Englishmen.
So what’s all this Alabama stuff about?
The Alabama lineage is the stuff Humphrey Bogart movies were made of, but less tragic. During World War II, the Royal Air Force sends its men to train in Alabama. RAF pilot meets southern belle from Alabama. They fall in love. RAF pilot goes off to fight the bad guys, helps win the war. Southern belle moves to England. The two get married and live happily ever after.
Those were Crofton’s parents.
Crofton grew up in Yorkshire, England on the coast of the North Sea. During his teen years, the swirl of music in the 1960s caught Crofton in its vortex and bands such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones did their part to lure him into broadcasting. Britain being Britain, there was only one outlet for him to exercise his passion, the BBC.
“Well, you could go in as a junior clerk and sit around and shuffle papers,” he said. “If you got a break, you got a break. There were thousands of applicants for every position. [The BBC] never appealed to me. I wanted to be a radio disk jockey. I wanted to do commercial radio. I’d been to America and seen American radio and heard it. I’d toured stations when I was a teenager and thought it was great.”
Crofton was American college bound. After brief stop in New York City, where he delivered Walter Cronkite’s mail at CBS — not as romantic as it sounds— he pointed himself toward Alabama. A man, uh, can’t escape his roots.
After radio school at the University of Alabama, Crofton set his sights on a warm climate. New York was exciting but too cold. Jacksonville beckoned. Coastal living was something of a prerequisite for Crofton after years of living in Yorkshire.
“I got here and just fell in love with the city,” he said. “I liked what was going on. The city was beginning to make some new moves. It was just a laid back kind of place that had something extra.”
With a few ill-fated and brief moves over the years, it’s been a pretty good 24 years in Jacksonville for Crofton. He’s been lured away twice, yet he keeps coming back. A New Port Richey radio station made him a juicy offer once. He stayed a year and a half. Seventeen years ago, a Washington, D.C. station made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
“Six months later, I was in a lawsuit with the owners of the radio station,” he said. He came back to Jacksonville. “I haven’t left since.”
In the age of media conglomeration, syndication and general homogenization, Crofton appears to be one of a dying breed of radio personalities in that he is an actual live voice in a studio in the same town that he broadcasts to. He’s also grown quite long of tooth for a radio man.
“This August will be my 12th anniversary of doing this show on this station with the same call letters and the same owner,” he said. “It’s a very long time. I’m the only morning guy in town who’s working for the guy who hired him.”
Crofton keeps his show clean. He’s no Bubba the Love Sponge, no Howard Stern or even Lex and Terry. It’s a family show, he says.
“There is a firewall between us and anything blue,” he noted. “That’s the way we choose for it to be. It is a good niche for us because it is rare but that is the way we feel.”
So what’s in Crofton’s CD player? What kind of music would the man who dares to keep it clean play for himself anyway? Barney the Dinosaur? Jim Nabors? Englebert Humperdink? Kenny G?
Kenny G. Certainly not. Mozart, Sting, Moody Blues, Dire Straits and a jazz CD are in the current rotation in the Crofton house. In fact, the normally urbane Crofton throws out a few spikes of passion when the topic turns to music. He brags about his son, the jazz musician who’s got his own trip-hop band in England. He salivates over the endless melodic runs of jazz legends like Davis and John Coltrane. But Kenny G? No. Not now. Not ever.
“I’m a huge devotee of classical music. I love jazz, I mean real jazz,” he explained. “I love to listen to Miles Davis and that kind of stuff. Coltrane. Real jazz. Not this smooth stuff. Not Kenny G. My son can play Kenny G up one side and down the other and wouldn’t even think about it. He would choose not to do it because you’re not even taxing the instrument or your abilities. You’re just putting out schmaltz.”
OK, so no Kenny G. Any other touchy subjects? How about retirement?
“There’s no retirement in our business,” he deadpanned. “You retire when you croak. They’ll carry me out of the studio in a pine box.”
He appears to be joking. That’s the problem with dry humor. It’s gravely serious lightheartedness.
So it seems safe to assume Crofton’s voice will be rippling across the First Coast for years to come. After nearly a quarter century, he makes it sound easy. Technical advances have taken the disk out of the jockey. All his music, commercial and jingles are loaded on a computer with massive memory. While the music may be point and click, there is no substitute for the live voice, thinking what to say, saying it well and being at the top of the game.
“It’s constantly being creative and doing what you want to do and doing it well and executing it well,” he said. “It’s not easy. I would dispute that. If you perceive it to be easy, then I’m doing my job.”